Student Launches Global Clean Air Campaign at United Nations

Pedro Piqueras launches his global clean air campaign during the Millennium Campus Conference at the United Nations in New York City, Thursday, August 13, 2015. Photo credit: Stuart Ramson/AP

RIVERSIDE, Calif. (www.ucr.edu) — A University of California, Riverside engineering graduate student has been selected as one of five students out of hundreds who applied to launch a global campaign this month during a student conference at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.

Other winning students launched campaigns in the categories of peace, oceans, equality and youth. Piqueras and the four other student delegates were selected from 400 submissions.

At the conference, Piqueras gave a presentation about his campaign, called fAIR4all, and those in attendance were able to sign on to join the campaign.

Pedro Piqueras outside the United Nations before launching his global clean air campaign during the Millennium Campus Conference at the United Nations in New York City, Thursday, August 13, 2015. Photo credit: Stuart Ramson/AP

The basics of the campaign are to empower the conference attendees to take action, especially in developing countries, and mobilize global citizens to secure safe air all parts of the world.

The end goal of the campaign is to establish clean air as a basic human right and to implement it within the international pantheon of essential public health services akin to clean water, vaccinations, family planning and primary care.

“If the international community recognizes clean air as a basic human right, it would enforce local, corporate, bilateral, and governmental bodies to finance projects and it would encourage private and public-private partnerships in all parts of the world to implement them, especially in developing and marginalized regions where air pollution usually causes the most harm yet where technologies for mitigation are most inaccessible,” Piqueras said. “There is also room for international cooperation, which is imperative, due to the global nature of air.”

According to the World Health Organization, seven million people died as a result of air pollution exposure in 2012. That is one in eight total global deaths, which makes air pollution the world’s largest single environmental health risk

Air pollution also relates directly and indirectly to all eight Millennium Development Goals that the United Nations established in 2000, Piqueras said.

However, according to the Millennium Goals Progress Report in 2014 there has been little to no progress made in the area of air pollution.

A native of Spain, Piqueras graduated from California Baptist University before enrolling at UC Riverside in 2013. He is conducting air pollution research with Akua Asa-Awuku, an associate professor of chemical and environmental engineering who does research at UC Riverside’s Center for Environmental Research and Technology.

While being interested in the science, he said he is also very interested in the policy and political aspects of his area of research.

“We scientists work hard at we do and if politicians are not in same boat as us what we do goes to waste,” Piqueras said. “I don’t want that to happen, especially with air. It affects us all, in one way or another. It is a shared resource and the current death toll is unacceptable.”

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The University of California, Riverside (www.ucr.edu) is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California's diverse culture, UCR's enrollment is now nearly 23,000 students. The campus opened a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual statewide economic impact of more than $1 billion.